This is a semi-response to Amy’s recent poll. It’s not a complete response because I have nothing to say for a bunch of these categories, and furthermore, I think it’s much more useful to have a few top picks in each category than just one winner. Probably the main reason why modern-day politics has been in such a slump is that too few jurisdictions have any form of preferential voting in place. Voting for just a single candidate (for example, plurality voting) is a terrible, terrible system. But I digress…

Anyway, in the preferentialist spirit, I will have four top-ranked contenders in each of the following eight categories:

Best Album — Best compilation of recordings in an album or mini-album format.

Best Single — Best release in the single format. All tracks are taken into consideration.

So … we’ve been at the halfway point for a while now. My original plan was to do this every year, and that certainly doesn’t look feasible at this point. Though getting through half the countdown in one year is some progress, I guess. The countdown covered only PVs up to and including 2007, so all the fantastic videos from 2008 weren’t included. And seeing as how this will continue on into 2009 without honoring the 2008 PVs, here’s a list of the 2008 H!P PVs that I thought were noteworthy, in alphabetical order:

Feeling inspired, I decided to try this out in Python. Unfortunately, while lambdas are supported in Python, they are purely functional, meaning it’s impossible to get side effects out of the recursive process like printing “LOVE” every time. You’d have to generate an infinitely long string of these and then print it out:

(printing “LOVE” an infinite number of times using named recursion in Python)

Feeling even more inspired, I decided to tackle the task of translating this into PostScript, which is totally one of the awesomest programming languages ever, even though many people who are familiar with it don’t realize its programming complexity and dismiss it as a simple page description language … ahem. (It’s the language behind PS files, the precursor to PDF.)

And behold, it worked!

(printing “LOVE” an infinite number of times using named recursion in PostScript)